Friday, January 11, 2013

Anthony Blunt

Most people today, though, detest Blunt's memory, because the secret turned out to have been that he was a Soviet spy. An intimate and recruit of the younger Guy Burgess, he began to work for the Soviets in 1937. At first he was merely a talent scout at Cambridge, where his main find was Michael Straight (later owner and editor of The New Republic and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts). During World War II, however, Blunt suddenly found himself employed at the heart of British military intelligence, in Department B of M.I.5. This was where surveillance teams and agents were based, and where German material translated by code-breakers at Bletchley was analyzed. Under the noses of trusting colleagues and respectful policemen, Blunt took many hundreds of documents home and had them photographed for his Soviet control. He provided detailed information about the personnel and working methods of M.I.5. He told the Soviets that the Enigma code had been broken, and gave them the date and place of the Allied landings in France in 1944.